Jobs board seeks help in 2013

Rob Varnon

Published 8:05 pm, Friday, December 21, 2012

Southwest Connecticut's job development board is seeking help from the private sector to overcome projected cuts in government spending next year.

On Friday morning, The WorkPlace held its annual meeting in Bridgeport to discuss progress on finding people employment and improving workforce skills. The group, which had a budget of $21 million for the last fiscal year, faces uncertainty over future funding as Congress considers a wave of tax increases and spending cuts to reduce the federal deficit.

The WorkPlace gets nearly half its budget from government appropriations and the other half from competitive grants, however, most of those grants are also from government sources.

It said it will try to secure corporate investments that are handed out for social and other community based programs and it is exploring the ways it might be able to use crowdfunding and bonding to help sustain its programs.

Automatic federal budget cuts are scheduled to go into effect Jan. 1,, and so far a compromise has not been reached in Washington.

The fiscal problems facing The WorkPlace as it attempts to help people get back to work through training and placement programs was overshadowed by the sorrow over the Newtown shooting massacre, which claimed 28 lives.

"I cannot say, `Happy Holiday.' I cannot say, `Merry Christmas,' " Joe Carbone, president and chief executive of The WorkPlace said during his presentation. "It has taken the spirit of the holiday season and tears it right out of your soul."

During the meeting, The WorkPlace held a moment of silence and rang bells 26 times to coincide with a national moment of mourning -- one chime for each of the 20 first graders and six educators killed by Adam Lanza, who also fatally shot his mother and himself.

Carbone said fiscal problems seem of so little importance in the aftermath of the shooting.

But the job board is facing cuts from a federal government that logged a $1.1 trillion deficit last year and a state that is also trying to fill a budget gap.

The timing could not be worse for Connecticut, where jobs growth has stalled, Carbone, said.

"We are stuck," Carbone said during his presentation to about 100 people. The labor force in Southwest Connecticut is almost exactly the same size it was four years ago, 409,523, and the number of people unemployed has remained above 33,000 in that same period.

In the meantime, The WorkPlace estimates 150 people a week and more than 800 across the state will exhaust their unemployment benefits, including special extensions that have been in place for years.

Carbone noted those extensions will end in January, though he's petitioning to have Congress keep them going.